Together we pausehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/49.4/together-we-pause
Sometimes we need to stop — to think about the ways we wreak havoc in the world.A crowd gathered by the window, staring out: Our plane had arrived. Early summer on a budget carrier, there were fewer wing-tipped passengers waiting than usual, more families in flip-flops, plenty of kids dragging mini roller bags. There’d be no empty seats on this plane. We’d take a short hop to Oakland then transfer to Seattle, Denver, Minneapolis, and beyond. With the boarding call expected any minute, the waiting area should have been loud and lively, but I emerged from the bathroom to utter silence.

I stood on tiptoes to try to see over the crowd, three rows deep, but I could not.

“What’s going on?” I whispered.

No one replied.

I’d seen a cop earlier, fully uniformed, not TSA, so I wondered if there was some kind of high-speed chase in progress on the tarmac — we weren’t that far from Los Angeles, after all — or maybe a medical emergency. I knelt down to try to see between people’s legs. As I did, I noticed that several men had removed their ball caps.

Then I saw. A casket had descended the baggage chute, flag-draped, secured in a frame of two-by-fours. Soldiers marched forward, five men and one woman, in full-dress uniform. They lifted the casket — the body — in unison and moved it to a rolling gurney. Then they stepped aside. Heat rose in waves from the asphalt. Nearby mountains stood barely visible, shrouded in wildfire smoke and ocean haze. All planes and vehicles and orange-vested employees stopped.

The family stepped from station wagons, a large family, mixed race, arm-in-arm, well-dressed. They approached the casket to have a moment to themselves.

With all of us.

Ground crew remove a casket from a Delta flight as members of the U.S. Navy salute.

Brendan Smialowski/AFP/ Getty Images

We felt the guilt of voyeurism, the intrusion of privacy, but we couldn’t turn away. This was, as they say, one of ours. Less than a month since Memorial Day, and what did we remember, really, besides picnics?

This. We would remember this.

Once before, I had a similar experience in very different circumstances. I’d driven the long winding road at Point Reyes National Seashore. Near sunset, I reached a packed parking lot at the road’s end. But as I walked the last half-mile to the dramatic lighthouse surrounded by sea, I realized that I had yet to see another soul, despite all the cars. Where had everyone gone? Suddenly, I came around the corner. A very large crowd of people was leaning against a chain-link fence, in absolute silence, looking out.

“What’s going on?” I whispered.

No one replied.

A man pointed toward the sea, and I gazed out for a silent minute until a gray whale surfaced, then another, then another, more whales than I’d ever seen in my life, and the people oooohed and aaaahed, fireworks-style, but did not otherwise speak. When the whales submerged, we stood in silence until they surfaced again. This lasted three-quarters of an hour. Only when the whales moved north and the sun began to set and we dispersed did I realize several people in the group did not speak English.

Iraqandafghanistan. Are these wars — is any war — right or wrong? Are migrating gray whales wonders of creation or the last of their species in this age of extinction? We can stop to analyze — we should, always, pause to think — about the ways we’re complicit, how the choices we make, deliberate or not, wreak havoc in the world.

But sometimes we just need to stop. Together. Like a shared reflex. We don’t even have to think about it.

On the tarmac, family members bowed their heads, fingered the edge of the flag, and wrapped themselves around each other as their hair and clothes grew disheveled in the heat and wind. Then, at last, they backed away. The soldiers marched to the gurney and lifted the casket into a hearse, which drove away followed by the family cars.

Inside the terminal, no one dared move. Kids fidgeted and were shushed. I’d been kneeling longer than I liked to, but I stayed kneeling.

Not long afterward, bags began to drop from the chute and we lined up to board, no longer silent, but not loud either. Once we sat and buckled ourselves in, the pilot spoke over the intercom, voice wavering, to say what an honor it was to have brought a soldier home to a final resting place. Meanwhile, the rest of us were on the move to Oakland, Seattle, Denver, Minneapolis and beyond. We taxied fast and lifted into the air, higher and higher, above the tarmac, then the mountains, strangers bound together, the binds loosening as smoke settled thick in the canyons below.

A view of Sahale Mountain, Park Creek Ridge and Mount Buckner in North Cascades National Park, from the Stehekin River Valley.

Deby Dixon/ NPS

In the late 1980s, I worked at a visitors’ center in a trailer at the entrance to the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park, a still relatively unknown place then, a kind of secret. To get there, you had to drive 35 miles off the highway through slickrock and green sage, hazy mountains on the horizon and cottonwoods along the creeks, as startling a landscape as you’d find anywhere. Cars arrived at lazy intervals, and when people reached the desk, the conversation was often the same.

That was the most beautiful drive we’ve ever taken, they’d say. Now, how do we drive out?

The same way you came in, we’d say.

Sometimes they’d complain loudly. Sometimes they’d mask their disappointment. Rarely did they show enthusiasm. It was both exasperating and the stuff of comedy, but part of me could sympathize.

When I was a kid, my family took cross-country trips and stopped at national parks — Zion, Bryce, Mesa Verde, the Grand Canyon. Were we finding solace in wide-open spaces? Uh, no. Our parents were just showing us all they could — on the way from one place to another— through the windows of an un-air-conditioned station wagon. Once, we kids refused to get out of the car: No more rock formations, we chanted. I sounded ungrateful, yes, but I was also getting hooked.

I remember standing on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, thinking: Someday I’ll go down there. The idea felt foreign but giddily within reach, like reading a book that opened a new world. When I finished college, I went straight to volunteer in a national park.

At the visitor center desk, the second set of questions was nearly as predictable as the first: Where can we camp with no one nearby? What hike does no one know about?

If we told people about the secret places, I wanted to say, they wouldn’t be secret anymore. Duh! But I also knew that part of me wanted them to stay secret so they could be mine alone. So I sighed and pointed out some less-popular trails and campgrounds.

There are a thousand reasons why I was a lousy visitor center ranger. I don’t like being indoors. I bristle at toeing a party line. I wear a uniform poorly –– “unkempt,” read one of my evaluations. But the biggest reason was my uneasiness. The love of nature sometimes seems to hinge on greediness. People aspire to “bag” peaks and “score” campsites. We elbow in, believing we’re more deserving because we are locals, or because we’ve invested more time or money into our vacation, or because we are stronger and more willing to take risks, or because, well, we’re wearing a uniform standing behind a desk.

I didn’t want to win the competition. I wanted to avoid it. So I found another relatively unknown park, North Cascades, joined trail crew, and headed for the unpeopled places.

All my best memories are out there: watching peaks float above clouds from a meadow thick with flowers — paintbrush, lupine, columbine, lily — sleeping in old-growth to the patter of raindrops on duff, steeped in cedar and smoke, cross-country skiing past a boulder in a river from which a lone otter track slid into an ice-hemmed pool, and, on one off-season trip, sitting alone beside the Colorado gazing up at the distant forested North Rim.

Still, I’m uneasy.

For one thing, I now realize these supposedly unpeopled places were actually well-known and often cared for by indigenous people. Then there’s the fact that working for the Park Service took me far away from people who were different from me. I’ve often said that I’m more scared of a subway than a cougar. Which is telling. What if, when I say I like to get away from people, subconsciously I mean certain types of people? There was a time I’d have denied it vehemently. Now, I am not so sure.

Still, I’m hooked.

Here’s the truth. I long to be in unpeopled places, and when I find them, I’m often overcome with aching loneliness. I miss the people I love. I desperately want to share these places, even if it means re-entering the fray.

Not long ago, I visited Yosemite in early spring with my mom. Parking lots were under construction, requiring muddy too-long walks for her, and calendar views hid behind a stubborn veil of clouds. We drove in and out in a single day, but stopped at a lone roadside picnic table where new blades of grass showed between melting snow berms. No one else stopped while we ate our string cheese and apples and listened the charge of distant running water and smelled wet pine and asphalt. For a moment, the clouds cleared, and we had our own private peek-a-boo view of Yosemite Falls charging from sky to earth. I’m telling you: We totally scored.

Ana Maria Spagna lives and writes in Stehekin, Washington. Her most recent book is Potluck: Community on the Edge of Wilderness. Follow @amspagna

]]>No publisherEssaysNational Park ServicePeople & PlacesRecreationNot on homepage2016/03/07 04:10:00 GMT-6ArticleThe tree in the riverhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/48.1/the-tree-in-the-river
A writer ponders a remnant of past disaster.The tree stands in the middle of the river. Not in a shallow side channel, but smack in the middle of the current, barkless, the trunk battered and discolored, like an ill and splotchy patient, or worse. Technically, the tree is a snag. But still it stands, a hundred feet tall or more, with limbs that elbow toward the sky. An osprey nests near the top.

The tree used to stand on dry ground, of course, a massive ponderosa pine, orange-barked and majestic, beside a trail through the woods. When the flood came to our valley 12 years ago, the river broadened and chiseled away at the bank, claiming the entire trail and a large chunk of road to boot.

We never saw it coming.

We should have seen it coming.

Osprey nest in a snag in the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, Idaho.

Marjorie McBride

But the tree still stands. We pass by it in cars or on bikes or, most often, on skis. The rerouted road isn’t plowed that far, so in winter a ragtag group of friends skis past regularly, in wool shirts and blue jeans and mismatched gear. Every time we do, we stop by the place in the river where it stands, to sip water or to peel off an extra layer of clothing, and mostly to marvel: It’s still there!

Sometimes I wonder why we love it so much. Is it nostalgia? Do we love it because it’s a remnant of the way things used to be? Or is it because of its stubborn endurance — like a boxer leaning hard against the ropes, one that will not go down, no matter what. Maybe, by now, it’s just familiarity. The snag is one of us. We try to impress others, people from outside the valley, try to get them to whistle through their teeth — would you look at that? Instead, they look at us pityingly: So this is what passes as entertainment up here. They’re right, of course. They’re also missing the point.

The tree still stands! Who could’ve known? How is it even possible?

We know that, someday, it will topple. We’ve even considered taking bets on when, but if we’d started taking bets back when we first started talking about it, by now everyone would’ve lost.

People like to predict when trees will fall. When I worked on trail crew, people did it all the time. The year after a big wildfire, they’d tell us: Better bring a lot of saw gas. But the roots of the blackened trees took years to loosen, and sometimes never loosened at all. Elsewhere, seemingly healthy trees snapped by the dozen. Trees fell for unexpected reasons — a pestilence in the willows, a freak snowstorm in the spring — or for no reason at all. We gave up trying to guess.

But it’s a hard habit to break, speculation. We must be hard-wired for it.

Lately, there’s been a glut of apocalyptic books. The end is caused by a pandemic flu or a war or a natural disaster. The fascination lies in predicting who will survive and where and how, and for how long they’ll survive. Some people bet on food production, some on weaponry; some on self-reliance, some on cooperation. A few outliers put faith in art. The truth is, we don’t know what will happen or when. Even while we try to hold it together, to prep and plan, we don’t know.

Meanwhile, remnants surround us: the meadow that didn’t burn, the sandy ocean bluff sloughing but not yet slid, the blackened toenail after a too-long hike, right before it peels off, the eerie glowing coals in a campfire in the rain. Something to cherish, something that can’t last. You come around one last bend before the view opens wide. An osprey swoops close. You look up and catch your breath. There it is, still standing, silhouetted white against the cloudless blue.

Ana Maria Spagna lives and writes in Stehekin, Washington. Her most recent book is Reclaimers.

]]>No publisherEssaysPeople & PlacesWashingtonWildlifePlantsNot on homepage2016/01/25 02:10:00 GMT-6ArticleA displaced California tribe reclaims sacred landhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/47.16/a-displaced-california-tribe-reclaims-sacred-land
The Mountain Maidu return to their valley, but the work of reclamation never ends.The last time I’d seen Ken, he’d been balancing barefoot across a log over Yellow Creek with his two young kids in tow. A healing ceremony for land damaged by logging in Humbug Valley, a 4,500-foot-elevation valley sacred to the Mountain Maidu, had just concluded. Ken tossed an expensive camera over one shoulder, then reconsidered. He placed the camera and his car keys in the duff beneath a ponderosa pine, and set off to lead the way. The log was weathered gray, the creek shallow, the kids wildly exuberant. They crossed with ease and turned around to return as the sun glowed gauzy on a ridge-top fringe of conifers, the few still standing.

Now, six months later, Ken held a passel of responsibilities. As the new executive director of the Maidu Summit Consortium, one of the last remaining speakers of the Maidu language, and the youngest son of elder, author and activist Beverly Ogle, he was in charge of wrangling this lively crowd. Which by the looks of it would be no easy task.

The news, after all, was still new. After more than a decade of trying, the Mountain Maidu, a small and federally unrecognized tribe, had reclaimed title to Humbug Valley from Pacific Gas & Electric Company. It had been a long saga: A judge in the early aughts, in the wake of the Enron scandal, ordered the utility to relinquish thousands of acres to conservation stewards. But PG&E did not consider the Mountain Maidu potential stewards. Like other outsiders, company representatives dismissed the Maidu as a loose band, a tribe without a central government and — until now — without a land base.

The Maidu were undeterred. They formed a nonprofit consortium, weaseled their way into meetings and recruited allies. They tackled on-the-ground projects — building cedar fences to protect gravesites and designing an interpretive kiosk, all as directed by a PG&E-appointed committee, in order to prove their ability to be good stewards on land they’d already tended for centuries. There were problems: A wildfire gave PG&E an excuse to clear-cut sacred sites and glean a little more profit before getting out. Most recently, they’d suffered the too-early death of Farrell Cunningham, one of their most charismatic leaders. When consortium members and friends and family met in Oakland to await the final decision, no one knew for sure what would happen. Now, less than a week later, with Tasman Koyom, as the Maidu call Humbug Valley, already under snow, they’d gathered to celebrate in this brand-new community center in Chester, the nearest town. I’d driven 800 miles to join them, but my journey had been even longer.

Three generations of Maidu, including elder Beverly Ogle, her daughter, Brenda Heard, and granddaughter, Yasmin Holbrook, display the traditional baskets woven with local willows by their ancestor, Ce’éste (known as Nellie Thomas).

courtesy Maidu Summit Consortium

A couple of years earlier, I set out to find stories of people reclaiming nature. It’s a funny word, reclamation, with a definition ripe with contradiction: to take back, to make right, and to make useful. The connotation is both moral and pragmatic, and sometimes the results are disastrous, but reclaiming seems to be an irrepressible human instinct. While some examples bordered on deception — grass seed pressure-sprayed atop flattened former mountaintops to mitigate mining, for example, or new wetlands created in vacant lots to justify development elsewhere — other stories were inspirational and very nearly triumphant. The best of them seemed to be a kind of re-reclaiming — re-taking what had once been taken. Making right what had gone wrong. Re-defining what useful might mean. The Mountain Maidu’s reclamation story — the one we were here to commemorate — was one of the very best.

I couldn’t imagine how Ken Holbrook’s story could be any better than that. But I was eager to hear it.

He’d recently traveled to Salamanca, Spain, he explained, to give a presentation on Maidu reclamation efforts. He described their plans to use traditional ecological knowledge — practical knowledge passed down over generations — to manage the land as an example not only to other indigenous people, but to land managers everywhere. Would-be reclaimers should seek alliances, he urged, partnerships with other organizations, as the Maidu had. When the deal was finalized, the Maidu Summit Consortium would hold fee title to Humbug Valley, but two partners — Feather River Land Trust and California Department of Fish and Wildlife — would jointly hold a conservation easement. The Land Trust would help determine how much development might be appropriate — campground improvements, for instance — then monitor that development. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife would manage the fishery, the pesky non-native brown trout and the wildlife, including endangered and potentially endangered species like the willow flycatcher and Sierra red fox. Even PG&E would remain a partner, in the financial sense: The company had agreed to provide funding for long-term planning and for two full-time staff positions, including Ken Holbrook’s. Still, the Maidu would own the land, and as owners they planned to hold ceremonies there, to use traditional ecological knowledge to tend the vegetation — to plant, nurture, prune and harvest — as their ancestors did, and to share these practices with visitors.

“But here’s the thing,” Ken said, leaning close. “When I spoke in Salamanca, I stood in the exact same place where Queen Isabella commissioned Christopher Columbus to come to the New World.” He paused and grinned.

“The exact same place,” he said.

Yellow Creek as it winds through the newly reclaimed Humbug Valley, California.

Bud Turner/Courtesy Feather River Land Trust

Reclamation, in the old days, almost always was the story of one great man — Floyd Dominy, say, or Gifford Pinchot, or John Muir — with a sweeping agenda. Even if their accomplishments, in hindsight, seem dubious, they sincerely believed in what they were doing. And there lies the rub. The definition of what constitutes “making right” is shifty. Taking back water that would be wasted running to the sea? Protecting forests from fires? Deeming land “untrammeled,” when it had been tended by indigenous people for centuries? Even Columbus must have had a righteous motive; it’s too cynical to believe it was all greed, and unrealistic to imagine he could’ve known the havoc he’d wreak. On the flipside, much could go wrong for the Mountain Maidu: Partnerships can sour, development can over-reach, and inviting more visitors to Humbug Valley — Farrell Cunningham had envisioned a future “Maidu National Park” — well, that’s a can of worms. Still, still, it’s our human instinct, and our human responsibility, to try to turn things around. Reclaiming isn’t preserving or restoring, but attempting to stand again in the exact same place, to try a new and better way. Or in this case, an old and better way. If there’s a hint of Sisyphus to it — when the hell will we get it right? — there’s hopefulness, too.

These days, I’ve found that reclaiming is more often than not a communal effort led largely by women and characterized by stubborn endurance and inclusiveness. For 35 years, 89-year-old Phyllis Clausen of Friends of the White Salmon River worked to bring down the aging and inefficient Condit Dam with help from American Rivers, the Yakama Nation and eventually PacifiCorp, the power company itself. Timbisha Shoshone elder Pauline Esteves, who can remember when the National Park Service first moved into Death Valley, led her tribe to reclaim their homeland with help from as far away as Europe and as close, at times, as the park superintendent’s office.

Then there’s Beverly Ogle. Her two books brim with adaptable characters who defy stereotypes. Her great-grandfather, a gold-mining Maidu teetotaler, fathered more than 20 children via two wives, including Beverly’s great-grandmother, a Pit River Atugewsi woman whom he bought as a child at a slave auction. Beverly’s motherplayed the violin and was shunned at her Indian school for having a white father; she later worked for a time as a Forest Service fire lookout. Beverly’s uncles trapped otter, mink, ermine, beavers, bobcats, coyotes and foxes, some into the 1980s. Her extended family includes loggers, miners and power company employees, along with victims of those same companies, and activists, like herself, who fought against them.

Early in our very first conversation, she described forming the Maidu Summit Consortium. There was a time, she said, when different factions within the tribe fought one another.

“We had to be all pulling in the right direction,” she said, sitting in her warm kitchen while rain poured down the windowpanes. “Like the old saying goes: ‘You take two twigs, you can bust them, but you put a bunch together, it’s harder to bust.’ ”

Even after the Maidu were allowed to enter the land discussions with PG&E, most of the focus remained on other places, more developed and developable, around the nearby reservoir, Lake Almanor. The Maidu were interested in these lands, too, of course. They’d like to build a cultural center, a museum or gallery, somewhere near a tourist mecca. But it’s Humbug Valley, with its miraculously undeveloped meadows, a mostly still-healthy forest, and a naturally carbonated spring bubbling up among moss-covered boulders, that means the most. You can tell by the way Beverly drops her voice, the way her tone changes from outrage to excitement.

“In the four years I worked as campground host out in Humbug Valley, we’d have gatherings, bear dances, potlucks. It was great. It was so good for our Maidu people.”

Our Maidu people. Never singular; never without the possessive.

Young would-be reclaimers often want to know how to make a difference. What to say? Love one place. Go to meetings. Make some food. Never turn down an ally. Never give up. Here’s the truth: You alone, you can’t do much. You with a bunch of friends, you can do one hell of a lot. Look around that room in Chester: You’ll see a Bay Area lawyer who worked pro bono for years, forest supervisors and seasonal firefighters, an archaeologist in a wheelchair, a logger with earrings, traditional clapper-stick singers in derby hats, all of them part of the whole — even the lone writer from a distant state, assiduously taking notes in the back of the room. This, too, I want to say: Allow yourself to be sucked into the fold.

At a healing ceremony held by the Maidu Summit in Humbug Valley, Beverly Ogle, Mountain Maidu elder and activist, is adorned with wormwood leaves before a sacred bearskin. Both have medicinal and spiritual properties.

Jane Braxton Little

When I heard that the Maidu had reclaimed Tasman Koyom, I did not wait for an invitation. I hopped in the car, landed in Red Bluff at nightfall and set up camp by the Sacramento River with two sleeping bags, a wool cap and mittens for reading by headlamp. But I couldn’t sleep. I got up and walked in the light of the gibbous moon among live oaks, thinking this might be it, the last trip, the end of my journey. The next morning I visited Beverly Ogle at home, brought her a bag of apples I’d picked with my mother in late fall. She sat beside her woodstove with her children and grandchildren coming and going, and she beamed. Like Martin Luther King Jr., she said, she had a dream.

“Only difference is, I lived to see it come true,” she said.

Now, at the community hall, the mood was like a sports team award banquet or a Fourth of July picnic, the gravitas understated, almost nonexistent. I filled a bowl with venison stew and picked up one of the Dixie cups and sat near the back of the room beside an elderberry flute maker, whom I’d met at the healing ceremony, and his family. While I waited for the stew to cool, I tasted the contents of the Dixie cup. It turned out to be acorn paste, a traditional Maidu staple that tastes exactly as you’d imagine: thick, earthy, nutty, slightly bland, filling, but not precisely satisfying. I choked it down with water. Considering the work that went into making it, wasting it seemed out of the question. Besides, it felt like communion. I looked around the room at the oddball assembly. I’d long since stopped trying to figure out who was Maidu and who was not. I remembered what Farrell Cunningham had said when we’d last gathered in Humbug Valley: We’re all Maidu today.

Ce’éste with her husband, Syntonum (Fred Thomas), and another of his wives, Betsy, and their children.

Courtesy Maidu Summit Consortium

Ce’éste, also known as Nellie Thomas, with a child on her back and baskets in the Humbug Valley c. 1896.

Courtesy Maidu Summit Consortium

When the formalities began, the first speakers were members of the Maidu Summit Consortium, people who endured years of negotiations and interminable meetings to get to this point. Their eyes sparkled as they described what this victory meant.

“This is what I dreamed of as a child,” Ken Holbrook began. He recalled camping in the valley, fishing in the creek, drinking from the carbonated springs, and I pictured him crossing Yellow Creek with his own kids.

Lorena Gorbet, another stalwart, unassuming leader, stood in a loose sleeveless summer dress at her place in the drum circle. “I never thought I’d see this day,” she said.

One woman, impeccably dressed, with the poise of a no-nonsense substitute teacher or perhaps a U.S. senator, was the only speaker to show any hint of anger. She stood, trembling, and approached the microphone.

“I never thought I’d live to see Indians given anything by the dominant culture,” she said.

The applause was long.

When at last Beverly Ogle rose, she described the moment she heard the news.

“I had this great urge to return to Humbug Valley, to tell our relatives, the forest, the birds, the animals, the grass, that they belong to us, and the healing can begin.”

Our relatives. This connection with what’s nonhuman, non-sentient even, adds a new twist to the whole concept of community, one that’s at the heart of books like Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and M. Kat Anderson’s Tending the Wild. Anderson argues for nurturing a “kincentric” relationship with nature, where plants and animals are seen as brothers and sisters. (Wallace Stegner said essentially the same thing 50 years ago, when he argued for the need to preserve wild places so humans remember that we are “brother to the animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong to it.”) When I talked with Kat Anderson, she reminded me repeatedly, insistently, that the ideas were never hers. The cumulative wisdom belongs to generations of Native people gathering on the land in a twofold sense: coming together, hanging out, and gathering what they need. It might seem like a modest vision, but it’s one with staying power. And when it materializes, like today, it feels huge.

At the end of the speeches, Brenda Heard-Duncan, Beverly Ogle’s daughter, made a surprise announcement. It was a surprise to Beverly, at least; her kids had told me the day before. Beverly was receiving a special lifetime achievement award from the Indigenous Communities of Northern California. With it came a handcrafted bow. Brenda, who presented the bow, announced proudly that Beverly Ogle was the first woman ever to receive this award. But, Brenda explained, there were no arrows to go with it. The ceremonial arrows will come later, next spring, when the snow melts and the Maidu return to Humbug Valley.

As tables were cleared, I moved around the room saying goodbye. I stopped to see Beverly last. She sat with the bow in her lap, gazing out at the room from a table strewn with empty acorn paste cups and half-eaten slices of cake. I waited my turn behind other well-wishers, then sat beside her to congratulate and thank her: for her friendship, her inspiration, for welcoming me into the fold.

“Now the real work begins,” she said. “And you’ll be back.” It was not a question.

I walked out into fading winter sun with my notes and an empty Tupperware container and drove until dark, from fire-scarred forest to wide dry basin, past small lakes — natural or dammed, it was impossible to tell — and small towns with boarded-up storefronts and tidy clapboard houses with porch lights on. I’d thought this trip would be the end, but now I knew the truth: The work of reclaiming never ends.

Mountain Maidu baskets, woven by Ce’éste in the traditional way using willows gathered from the Humbug Valley.

Courtesy Maidu Summit Consortium

Ana Maria Spagna is the author of two essay collections, a memoir/history, and most recently, the handy guidebook, 100 Skills You’ll Need for the End of the World (As We Know It) andReclaimers, new from University of Washington Press, from which this essay is adapted. She lives in Stehekin, Washington, with her wife, Laurie Thompson.

]]>No publisherBooks & EssaysTribesPeople & PlacesCommunitiesCaliforniaFeatures2015/09/14 03:10:00 GMT-6ArticleSummer swimming in a Washington lakehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.13/summer-swimming-in-a-mountain-lake
A writer takes the plunge in frigid water. When I was a kid, I swam all summer in backyard pools and at the city park, lessons in the morning, wildness all afternoon. My bare feet grew calluses, my hair turned brittle green, my shoulders got broad, my Lycra suits disintegrated. And then I left home.

I've lived in this mountain town for a very long time now. There's no pool here, no pool for miles. There is a beautiful lake, sure, gorgeous. The water reflects tall firs and blue sky and mossy cascade-draped cliffs, but it is very cold. Jump in on the hottest August day, and you'll lose your breath. You can't stay in five minutes. Sometimes you can't jump in at all.

There are problems with living in one place too long. You know everyone, and they know you. You carry grudges from battles long forgotten. Sometimes you get bored. Sometimes you sit around the campfire telling stories about people and realize they have all left or died, and you think: I am way too young for this. Something has to change.

Last summer, something did.

A friend persuaded me to sign up for a triathlon. And since there's no pool in town, that meant I'd have to train in the lake. I'd owned a wetsuit before, a kid-sized Spider-Man getup for which I'd traded a raincoat, but it wasn't very warm. This time, I got serious. I bought a new wetsuit, thick and sleek and buoyant, and added booties, gloves and heavy scuba hood. Suddenly, I could stay in.

I swam to one submerged log to rest, then, as I grew stronger, to another, then another. I swam around a grassy island, past nesting geese and a hidden fort made by kids. At first I was afraid. I feared an asthma attack, feared getting cold, feared a motorboat moving too fast might mow me down. Over time, I settled in and breathed easier.

There's an expansiveness that, until now, I've only ever felt high in the mountains, a punch-drunk openheartedness that makes me wish that everyone I've ever loved could be right there, right then, for that sunset or that meadow or, in this case, for the stretched-out soothe of swimming through open water. Breathe right to see the sun-glimmered surface. Breathe left to see still snowy peaks. Away from shore, everything seems new.

Sometimes I'd look down through clear water and see a large peace symbol, 15 or 20 feet across, made of river rocks set in the sand by short-term neighbors one winter when the lake was drawn down. The neighbors are long gone, but the peace symbol remains. I always tried to find it, and sometimes I couldn't. When I did, it felt like a good omen.

Here's the truth. You think you know a place inside out. You think you can't change your perspective, but you can. You think you're alone, but you're not.

Now, in our lake, there's a small group of us who swim regularly. One evening we swam away from a campfire birthday party at dusk. Dogs barked on distant shores. An osprey perched atop a cottonwood snag. Flocks of gulls circled like swifts, wide white shrouds against granite, then spiraled out of view. One Sunday, we swam across the lake, nearly a mile, with paddleboard escorts. We swam, unwittingly, with our arms in perfect sync, like marchers in a parade, like birds in flight. We reached the far shore and rested on a smooth slab of rock beneath Indian pictographs painted centuries before. Then we turned for home, no longer in perfect sync, finding our own separate courses, but still in the same cold water, still in it together.

I kept swimming into fall until one morning, even with all the gear – wetsuit, booties, gloves, hood, goggles – my face hit the water and the sting came as a shock. I told myself: Keep swimming, you'll get used to it. I stopped at the first log to catch my breath and take in the view: yellow alders on the hillsides, red vine maples in steep chutes, blue sky bluer than summer, bluer than anything, and the lake reflecting it all. It was beautiful, yes, stunning. But it hurt too much.

I turned and swam hard for home.

Ana Maria Spagna lives and swims in Stehekin, Washington. Her most recent book is Potluck: Community on the Edge of Wilderness.

]]>No publisherRecreationCommunitiesRivers & LakesWashingtonEssays2014/08/04 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleThe story of Gimpyhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/45.15/the-story-of-gimpy
An injured black bear draws sympathy from the community. There's an injured bear in the apple orchard. This should not be huge news. Despite the rash of bear-proofing measures from electric fences to removing all the apples to hazing with firecrackers, bears frequent the historic orchard that my partner maintains in north-central Washington. So bears aren't a surprise, and they don't usually stop locals in their tracks. But this one does.

He's a big black bear, or at least he was big before he got hurt. Now he hop-walks with his right rear paw held high against his belly, and he's getting skinnier by the day, which makes him look lanky and disconcertingly human. The urge to weep or to toss him a dozen apples or -- the most realistic option -- to shoot him and get it over with is almost unbearable.

But why? What is it with us and animals?

My mother taught me, in no uncertain terms, that animals aren't people. She could not abide anthropomorphizing, and she wouldn't have abided house pets either except for my infernal pestering. The dog I got for my 10th birthday answered to two names: Junior, which I called her with typical little-kid gender confusion, and Damned Dog, as my mother called her. Junior was poorly treated, never allowed indoors, rarely walked. Or maybe she was just treated like an animal. I have friends who pamper their pets immoderately and others who admonish those friends behind their backs. Dogs are dogs, they say. Sheesh. Don't let them sleep on pillows! Don't feed them skinless boneless breast meat! Come on!

Then there are wild animals. We fetishize and idolize them, with sea turtle trinkets and howling wolf T-shirts, and sometimes we seek to commune with them. Though in my experience, wild animals, like housecats and celebrities, usually avoid those most eager for communion. Visitors who want to see bears up here sometimes see none, while locals who would rather not often see a half-dozen a day.

For no reason I can figure, I've had a year of animal encounters. A rattlesnake struck my bike tire. A mountain goat charged my car. I saw a gray whale breach and an elephant seal scratch its whiskery chin, both up close. And one day when nothing was going right, nothing at all, a red fox curled up in a lawn chair and looked me in the eye, and everything changed. I have no explanation. None. But I'm grateful.

Now there's this bear. Gimpy, we call him, to try to make the situation sound casual. But it isn't. I stopped to watch him this morning while I was out running. I couldn't help myself. He'd hop a few steps, lie in the tall grass, and then he'd hop some more. Most of the apples are gone. All the other bears are. The salmon have arrived, and they are busy gorging on spawning kokanee. Gimpy can't even make the quarter-mile trek to the river, and he surely couldn't catch a wriggling fish.

A visitor went to the ranger station to report that the bear had approached him, that it seemed to be beseeching him, asking for help. Everyone was skeptical; the injured bear would not approach a human; he's been firecracker-hazed too often. If he did approach a human, it would probably be because bears' eyesight is famously poor. The beseeching is unlikely. But the feeling of being beseeched, well, we've all felt it. We feel it still.

Years ago, when the damned dog was dying, my mother finally let her inside. The dog went straight to my bed and curled up, though she'd never been in the house and shouldn't have known which room had been mine. Anyway, I'd left home months before. Truth is, we were connected somehow, Junior and I. My mother felt it, too, and she felt that she owed this fellow creature something, her sympathy at least, maybe her mercy.

There are people standing in the orchard right now watching the bear. They can't help themselves. We've heard the Fish and Wildlife guys are on their way, that they fear Gimpy might pose a danger if he were to feel threatened. That, too, seems unlikely, but if it gives the guys an excuse to do what must be done, then so be it.

Gimpy will die soon enough, by fate or mercy, and in the grand scheme of things, I don't know which way is right. But I do know there is no one watching that bear today whose heart does not lurch with every pained step and who does not know this: We're all connected somehow, and we owe our fellow creatures something.

Ana Maria Spagna is the author most recently of Potluck: Community on the Edge of Wilderness.

Note: A hunter later put the bear out of its misery. He reported that the animal's injury was apparently caused by a bullet that had entered at the hip and exited through the belly.

]]>No publisherWildlifeEssays2013/09/13 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleLove winshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/45.2/love-wins
After 22 years, a couple gets the first same-sex marriage in their rural Washington county.On the first day marriage licenses could be issued to same-sex couples in Washington state, Laurie and I headed to our rural county courthouse, expecting a long wait. In Seattle, we'd heard, couples had been lined up at the King County Courthouse since midnight. We pulled up to the courthouse on a gray winter morning and looked around. No line in sight. Nobody there.

We hadn't expected to be there, either.

For months, I'd told everyone that if R-74 passed, Laurie and I would wake up the day after the election married. Voilà! I'd read somewhere that all state-registered domestic partnerships would simply be converted into marriages. That was the least Washington could offer us, I figured, for our 22 years of waiting.

On Election Night, we celebrated with a bonfire. But nearly a month later, I read the small print online. Our domestic partnership had not converted. It would convert, yes, but not until 2014. If we wanted to get married sooner, the first legal day to obtain a license would be exactly 30 days after the election. I checked the calendar: Two days from now.

Neither of us is good at formal occasions. And maybe it wouldn't make any difference -- we'd already been committed for so long. But why not join in the celebration?

Well, logistics, for one. To reach so-called civilization from our remote landlocked home requires a ferry ride, and the ferry only runs every other day. To complicate matters, any Washington state marriage license has a three-day wait. Get a license Thursday, and the earliest you can marry is Sunday. That would mean, for us, a five-night stay in a motel. If we wanted to get married, in other words, we'd have to start packing.

Or I would. Laurie already had.

"I don't know," I said. "I'm pretty happy at my desk." Then I thought about it. "If I stay home, does it seem like I'd rather work than marry you?"

"A little," she said.

And so the next morning, we walked into the silent courthouse. We'd worn our best T-shirts: Mine read "Get Engaged: Approve R-74." Laurie's showed an outline of the state with a heart in the middle. "Love Wins," it said simply.

"We want to apply for a marriage license," I said.

The clerk broke into a grin. They'd been waiting for their first couple, she said. She'd dressed up for the occasion. They all had. She posed for a photo with us and passed us to her boss, who grew teary filling out the forms. A reporter from the local paper appeared, and a photographer snapped a shot in which Laurie and I beam like lucky lottery winners.

The story landed on the first page –– in full color. For three days, as we waited, well-wishers appeared out of nowhere, everywhere. We'd be recognized at a mini-mart and end up in a long conversation with enthusiastic strangers. Washington had become the first state in the country to make same-sex marriage legal in the voting booth, not a judge's chamber. Congratulations came from ferry captains and grocers, grade-school soccer coaches and online students.

Of course, there was a flipside –– the inevitable awkward stares, some from people who knew us well. Did it hurt? It did. There's the natural, personal hurt: Aren't you happy for us? And the deeper sociological and moral pain: I don't get to vote on your love, why do you get to vote on mine? Truth is, that hurt -- and the fear of it -- was partly the reason I'd been tempted to stay at home. But that would've been a big mistake.

When the day arrived, our friends did, too. They'd caught wind of our plan to do the ceremony at a nearby ski area, and they'd chartered a private boat to take them down the wintry lake. They rode the chairlift, non-skiers and skiers alike, bearing champagne and roses, and gathered in the cold outside a tiny midway lodge. The judge's black robe whipped in the wind. Laurie and I stood there in pink coats and telemark boots and exchanged the vows we'd composed in the night and the rings we'd bought two decades earlier. We tossed our bouquets and cut cuffs of long underwear as garters, then -- inexplicably, spontaneously -- snipped bits of hair from each guest. They blew into the forest like rice or confetti, nesting material for the birds.

We tried to play the Partridge Family, but the portable speakers were not loud enough, so we sang instead, over and over, the song we used to sing years ago when our friendship seemed dangerously on the verge of something more: "I think I love you, so what am I so afraid of?"

Afterward, we took one last run in the alpine glow, trailing "Just Married" cans tied to our bindings with ribbons. Our friends told us they'd never seen us so happy. Ever.

Sometime that night, Laurie rolled over.

"It feels different," she said.

"It does," I said. "Completely."

Ana Maria Spagna's most recent book is Potluck: Community on the Edge of Wilderness.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesEssays2013/02/04 02:00:00 GMT-6ArticleThe right tributaryhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/44.20/the-right-tributary
A writer gets roped into fish surveys for endangered bull trout.Yesterday I took a long walk up a cold stream in search of bull trout. I didn't really expect to see fish. Instead, I'd come to see redds -- the gravel nests in which fish lay eggs -- because I'd been trying to write a story about salmon and realized I knew nothing whatsoever about them. So I called the Forest Service, and next thing you know I was standing at a trailhead, with waders in my pack and a broomstick in my hand.

"Fall feels like stream survey season," one companion announced as four of us, all women, cinched pack straps and retied boots. "Doesn't it?"

I didn't know, I replied. I'd never done one. She told me she was, like me, a volunteer. Normally, she worked as a biologist for another agency. Today, however, she'd taken the day off.

"You're in for a treat," she said.

This much I know about federal land managers: They're often desk-shackled, mired in paperwork and politics, an endless cycle of public meetings and setbacks and revisions. But they're heroes to my mind, or she-roes in this case. I've long suspected that our most reliable bulwark against the exploitation of forests or deserts or rivers isn't monkey-wrenchers or tree-sitters; it's these stalwart government employees whose careers, over time, grow less and less like Aldo Leopold's and more and more like the title character in Kurosawa's Ikiru, the desperate entrenched bureaucrat trying to find meaning in a life of repetition. One way to make that meaning, or at least find some relief, is to get the heck outside. These women had done so.

So I was impressed. I was also concerned. When I signed up, I pictured a stroll along a stream bank. The waders, the broomstick -- striped with colored depth markers -- and the overstuffed daypacks disabused me of that notion. We'll walk how far? I asked. A couple miles? Perhaps an hour?

"Hours," another volunteer replied. "We'll be in the water for four or five hours."

The group leader, Cindy, paired up with me and announced that we'd take a lower, easier stretch of creek. We hiked at a steady clip, then stopped at a small side channel.

"This is us," she said.

We dropped down through devil's club, over downed cedars, through deep pools. Should a zoo or a nature preserve try to recreate a healthy mid-elevation forest like this, they'd never get it right. Moss so thick, logs this weathered and wedged: You can't fake it. As we walked, Cindy explained the surveys. They do them each fall on three tributaries -- "tribs" she calls them -- and she's been doing them for 20 years.

"Twenty years?"

She nodded and kept moving.

Bull trout, she explained, are less romanticized than salmon -- maybe it's the name? -- but they're the choosiest of salmonid species. They want the coldest, cleanest water, the least manipulated stream banks, the most intact forests. Prima donnas, you might say, or else savvy customers.

We reached the main trib, and Cindy forged ahead, never breaking stride. I stumbled behind through thigh-deep water, leaning hard on the now-essential broomstick.

The rocks on the bottom ranged in earth tones from rust to orange, with quartz veins shimmering white. Where they were polished clean -- no dirt, no algae -- that's where we looked. There the fish dig a shallow depression, lay eggs, then cover them with rocks the size of a toddler's fist: the redd. After an hour or so, at last, I began to see redds clearly. We'd hang a flag on a nearby limb and label them: possible, probable, definite.

Then the fish appeared: A spawning pair in a wide shallow swath. The male eased beside the female, more snuggle than thrust, and the female flipped on her back to expose a silver belly and writhed. I gasped. What part of the sex act, I wondered, was this?

On cue, the male joined the frenzy, and together they did a little housework.

Cindy sat watching, nearly giddy but utterly silent.

There are days that make work worth it: When a teacher hears a kid spell correctly out loud, when a mason fits a corner tight, when a musician hits the right note. Back home when I'll try, animated and desperate, to describe the scene in the creek -- like prayer, I'll say -- I'll picture Cindy, too, and the way, when we caught up with the others, they buzzed with excitement. They'd seen more than 40 redds. Definite. And they'd seen fish, far more than we had, and even though they'd seen them before -- plenty of times -- they described them doing what they do, over and over again, with wonder.

On the way back down the trail, no one talked about ecology or interconnectedness. No one discussed the effects of dams or logging. Like people anywhere who do their jobs well, my companions were busy doing it. They didn't need to get philosophical. When I asked where, exactly, the wilderness boundary might be -- that arbitrary hard-fought line on the land -- none of them knew for sure.

"Around here somewhere," one said with a shrug. "The fish can't tell. They just know when they've got it good."

]]>No publisherWildlifeEssays2012/12/07 02:00:00 GMT-6ArticleA fire lookout in a wilderness speaks of our pasthttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/a-fire-lookout-in-a-wilderness-speaks-of-our-past
The Green Mountain Fire Lookout in Washington's Glacier Peak Wilderness is worth preserving, partly in memory of the workers who built it.If monster mansions in Jackson, Wyo., or Sun Valley, Idaho, can boast million-dollar views, what's a historic cabin in Washington's Glacier Peak Wilderness worth? From this cabin that used to be a wildfire lookout, you can see a sea of summits, glaciers, a volcano and hidden lakes mostly surrounded by uncut forests.

Green Mountain Lookout, a historic 14-by-14-foot structure built in 1933, has gone through several stages of rehabilitation, and then, after a few missteps, a reconstruction. Now, suddenly, a group called Wilderness Watch wants to tear it down.

If you want to be contrary about this issue, there are plenty of arguments against fire lookouts. There's the premise critics start with -- the mistaken idea decades ago that putting out all fires was noble and necessary. Then there's the fact that wilderness is supposed to be untrammeled, and what's a flammable wooden and glass house on a mountaintop if not hardcore trammeling? And to be honest -- as someone who worked in the woods -- I don't feel called upon to revere the various writers and poets who were paid to sit and scribble in some of these historic lookouts.

Still, Green Mountain Lookout takes my breath away. I don't idolize the (mostly) men who spent their summers sitting inside, but I am awed by the people who built the lookouts. Often they were Civilian Conservation Corps members or local packers or trail workers, poorly paid and outfitted. Always they were hardy and courageous, skilled and earnest, and wowed -- I'm guessing now -- by the luck that landed them in these unspeakably lovely places.

I make this guess, in part, because I have friends who helped rebuild Green Mountain Lookout: not just the hewing and sawing and the careful salvage of shiplap siding, but the paper-pushing, the negotiating, the hoop-hopping required to make it happen. I cannot bear to toss their good labors aside.

This is not to say that everything built must stay built. The Elwha Dam is a case in point. I'll be there cheering when it comes down. The Green Mountain Lookout may, arguably, be doing little good, but it's also doing no harm. It's not, for example, dooming an entire salmon run to extinction. The lookout's only crimes are crimes against human sensibilities.

The basis for the Wilderness Watch lawsuit lies in helicopters. Helicopters are, of course, officially forbidden in wilderness, though they are used to fight fires, for rescues and occasionally for trail construction -- or in this case, lookout reconstruction -- once the proper hoops have been hopped. The gray area is troublesome, sure. But is the offense of hearing a helicopter so heinous it merits a lawsuit? Is it worse than the treatment of prisoners of war (or non-war)? Or the poisoning of rivers? Or the denial of climate change? Part of what galls me in this case is the sheer waste of activist energy.

But there's more. If every human instinct has a rusty underbelly, the downside of wilderness protection is the desire to pretend we are the first humans to arrive in a pristine land. As if Lewis and Clark did not depend on the kindness of Indians. As if modern hikers do not depend on constructed roads, cleared trails, sturdy bridges. Fooling ourselves into believing we're first seems like a kind of re-conquering, a dangerous game that allows our egos to grow big and unwieldy, the same egos that wreaked havoc in the first place.

I don't want to play pretend. I'd rather honor the people who came before me. I'd rather share their passion for grandeur. If I'm lucky enough to spend the night in a lookout that's meticulously maintained by volunteers or seasonal laborers, I'd rather appreciate the roof over my head as I look out at the roofless miles, and be grateful.

Wilderness is about humility. Walk a dozen miles off a road and you're instantly at the mercy of predators and of the elements. You can be humbled by nature, and also, I'd argue, by our own humanity.

Stand at Green Mountain Lookout and look to the southwest. You can see the scars of clear-cuts and the stretch of highway that leads to shopping malls and parking lots and paved-over wetlands. Humanity is responsible for both clear-cuts and the Wilderness Act, and even for a few lines of poetry that have transcended geography and generation.

Among the best things wilderness can do is make us realize that what we do counts. Some of it is marvelous, some of it catastrophic. Fire lookouts sit smack on the divide. Tearing down Green Mountain Lookout won't erase that.

Ana Maria Spagna is a contributor to Writers on the Range, an op ed syndicate of High Country News (hcn.org). She is a writer in Stehekin, Washington.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesWriters on the RangeEssays2011/07/07 00:00:00 GMT-6ArticleThe sign makerhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/43.6/the-sign-maker
The wooden signs Phil Garfoot made still offer directions to his friends, even after his death.When you arrive in town, anywhere in Stehekin, his signs are the first thing you see. On slabs of wood chainsaw-ripped and elegantly routed, in rustic block print or flowing cursive, Phil's signs are never stenciled, never sloppy. They mark the post office, the school, the bakery. They mark trailheads and trail junctions. They are, in a way, a trademark, a large part of what makes this Washington valley seem intimate and authentic, the kind of place where someone will take the time to salvage a half-burned chunk of cedar and turn an outhouse sign into a work of art. The signs occasionally lay out rules: "No Parking" or "Horses and Hikers Only." More often, they offer direction or reassurance: You're in the right place! You're heading the right way!

For 14 years, I worked for Phil Garfoot on trail crew. His main job, like mine, was to clear logs and brush, to build bridges and blast rocks and grub in the dirt. On top of that, for him, came signs -- a thankless task, if there ever was one. People don't notice signs until there's something wrong: an unmarked junction, a rotted signpost, a camp name that's since been changed. Or even a slight misunderstanding: A hiker looks upslope when the sign is downslope or confuses High Bridge with Bridge Creek, and suddenly she's lost, and often enough, angry. Compliments are few, complaints are many.

Over the years, I saw Phil get mad about plenty of things, but never about that. He'd think instead about how to fix the problem, then he'd race up the trail with a replacement sign - a salvaged slab, usually, twisty or knotty - or perhaps an added arrow. He was vigilant, nearly fanatic, about those signs, and he demanded that we were, too.

There were rules about how deep to dig a signpost, of course, and how sturdy to make it. (Very!) But there were other rules, too, less practical: The height of the posts, low to the ground, the way to bevel the top of the post, to round off the hard edge. Lag screws and washers had to be countersunk and never shiny. Not in the backcountry. If I put a sign up with a bright new lag, he'd carry up a rusty one to replace it.

Once, a manager hiked past a boundary post that, because of space limitations, read: "North Cascade National Park." He wrote a memo to Phil explaining that the sign was missing an "S." Phil routed a new one right away; he carried it 10 miles and dug it into place. The new sign read: "North Cascade National Parks."

Phil's goal was not so much precision as appearance. He wanted to make the sign fit in, as though it grew there.

Phil was rough-hewn and leather-skinned from a half-century of working in the hot sun -- the hotter the better for this Fresno native -- and his shoulders bulged out of proportion to his modest height. I never noticed them when we worked together, but when I see old pictures now, I am shocked. Because once cancer got hold of him, he didn't look that way anymore.

There are things in life you note but don't notice; things you heed heedlessly, you register without registering. Signs are like that, or the best of them are. Phil taught me that much. On a trail, he'd say, you want to know which way is which. Nothing more. Now I'm not so sure that's true. Sometimes, in the woods, you want to see a sign to know someone came this way before.

That's where that other meaning comes in. People get lost in life, and they look for a sign. A bear cub sighting. A shooting star. A shiny dropped penny. An uncanny phone call. It's a sign! I've never been much of a sign-seeker. But once Phil died, I couldn't help myself.

Here he'd always been: stubborn and reliable as stone. Then he's gone. I knew that other people felt his presence. A red-winged blackbird on the tiptop of an apple tree sang comfort to one friend. Another watched the moon skim a ridge at sunrise. Me? Nada. I felt bereft -- lost. I had always counted on Phil to tell me: You're in the right place! You're heading the right way!

Now where would I look? Everywhere. Anywhere. His signs are the first thing you see.

Ana Maria Spagna lives and writes in Stehekin, Washington.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesEssays2011/04/22 00:00:00 GMT-6ArticleGrace behind glasshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/42.19/grace-behind-glass
An fish ladder on the Columbia River provides a view of unexpected wonders.The Columbia rolls blue and wide, sluicing through brown suede hillsides, glacier-flattened and sun-baked. Along the banks, apples ripen under a puffy-cloud sky. Jet skis whine; powerboats groan; fishermen wade into the shallows. I drive this road regularly, so the scene is familiar: torn-out orchards, newly planted vineyards, a fence to keep bighorns from dashing into traffic, painted rocks lauding various high school classes. On the horizon, mountain peaks sport dregs of snow. The day is gorgeous. It’s also hot as hell, over a hundred, and I’m racing to try to see some fish.

Which seems a little silly. We see salmon all the time, Kokanee usually, at home where the land-locked sockeye come to spawn each fall. Going to see salmon at a fish ladder is like going to see chipmunks at a zoo. But the newspaper reported last month that this has been a record season for sockeye, the largest since they began counting -- over 23,000 in one day -- and I realized I’d passed Rocky Reach Dam a thousand times and never stopped. So today is my day, I’ve decided, if I can beat the 4 p.m. closing time.

I take a hard left and stop beside an entry booth. U.S. Homeland Security. An armed guard asks for my picture ID and then waves me on, down a curved lane into another dimension. Parking lot lampposts hold pots of petunias in near-patriotic shades -- pink, white and blue. Signs direct visitors to a native plant garden, a visitor center, RV parking, and a large multicolored playground for kids.

Then you see the dam. None of the diversions compares with the shock of this arcing slab of concrete across the wide river. A large tube snakes around its edge like an industrial waterslide: a new juvenile fish bypass. Close to a mile long and up to nine feet in diameter, the bypass is designed to take young salmon and steelhead around the dam on their trip downriver. More or less the opposite of a fish ladder, it cost $107 million to build. The new bypass, though, is not the reason for the record run. Biologists say only that the run was "unexpected" and "hard to explain." In other words: A mystery.

The place is deserted, not one other car. It begins to dawn on me that a record run reported last month might not mean much this month. Undaunted, I park and head into the visitor center building, sleek-lined and dusty turquoise, a throwback to the 1960s, like something you’d see on I Dream of Jeannie. Another guard. A metal detector. Then I’m inside. I ask about fish, and the guard looks up from take-out Thai, glances at the clock, and points down the stairs to an empty room with three large viewing windows.

Nothing, nothing. Murky water. Sun glare on cement. Then it appears, muscled and purposeful. Not a sockeye -- a steelhead. Undulating like a belly dancer’s abs, all grace and power and seduction.

I hear my own voice echo off linoleum: A gasp, a cry, an exclamation.

Years ago I read an article where the author described watching young lovers in the Soviet Union walk arm-in-arm and marveled at how even in such a repressive setting -- surrounded by concrete architecture, straight-legged soldiers, Cold War tension -- tenderness endured. Then, the writer said, he began to notice joggers. Not just romance, but a more individual urge, too, thrived. The author was heartened, maybe even moved. Now I am, too.

Despite the oppression of roads and dams, concrete and steel, powerboats and pesticide run-off, a steelhead charges upstream. What magic. What mystery. It’s like young love -- like a mid-life marathon.

Another fish appears, and I cry out again. I can’t help it.

A digital ticker above the emergency exit lists the number of each species that passes through the dam. So far today the video monitor has counted 238 chinook, 242 steelhead, 28 sockeye, three lamprey. The miracle, I realize, is not just that the fish survive, but that they’re shepherded past this dangerous place. By biologists, engineers, activists, judges and ratepayers. We’ve made mistakes, God knows. No surprise there. The surprise is that, despite rancor and derision, despite terrorist protections and antiquated facilities, despite our ignorance, even, about why salmon runs swell or deplete, we can still, collectively, decide to spend $107 million to try to get juvenile fish downstream. Just so they can come back up. What hard-wired instinct is this? In a world of such weight and trouble, to care for a creature shorter than my shin.

Three minutes to closing. I decide to leave, only to find a motley group just arriving, people in business dress with name tags on. What brings them here, I cannot imagine. They look more chamber of commerce than eco-tourist. I pass them on the stairs. Then wait.

Within moments, I hear it: a cry of delight. Then another.

Ana Maria Spagna lives and writes in Stehekin, Washington.

]]>No publisherWildlifeColumbia RiverEssays2010/11/12 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleDrive that Hummerhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/42.2/drive-that-hummer
If you could find a Hummer that got perfect gas mileage and didn’t pollute, would you be willing to get behind the wheel? The question arose at a dinner party outside Los Angeles. Suppose someone gave you a Hummer that got 100 miles per gallon and was fixed so that it emitted no pollutants whatsoever. If nobody knew but you, would you drive it?

It was, for me, a no-brainer.

"Of course I'd drive that Hummer," I said.

My answer was too emphatic, I knew. Maybe because of the crowd. Whenever I'm around friends from high school, I re-adopt my adolescent shrug: I don't care what you think. About my unfashionable clothes, my hard-to-explain writer job, my harder-to-explain cabin in the boonies: I don't care.

"What if it had American flag decals all over it?"

I dug in deep. I don't like posturing: buying or wearing or driving things because of how they look. Maybe because when you spend twenty years in a committed gay relationship, you learn not to worry about appearances. You don't live the way you do to offend anybody or to impress anybody. You do it because it's right for you. And a car with no emissions and great gas mileage: What could be more right?

"I'd still drive it."

No one else agreed. They looked at me askance. Hadn't I been the purist once: the churchgoer, the straight-A getter, then the flower-sniffer, the Thoreauvian rejecter-of-materialism? Something, clearly, had gone wrong. The party game ended, but for months I kept thinking about that Hummer.

Maybe, I thought, it comes down to that old theological conundrum. Is it faith that saves us or good works? What we believe or how we live? Martin Luther or Thomas Aquinas? Me, I think what we do is what counts.

Here's why: I have neighbors who don't believe in global warming, not one bit, but you'd never know it from how they live. They walk and bike frequently and almost never fly. They grow their own food or hunt for it. They live in modest cabins and heat with wood removed for the forest's health. They're doing a whole lot more to save the world than most true believers.

So, yes, I told myself: I'd drive that Hummer.

If there was anyone who'd agree with me, I figured it'd be my friend George. George maintains a Web site devoted to non-motorized transportation, but he also sews his own less-than-fashionable clothes and once made us quiches with store-bought crusts: one Oreo cookie, one Nilla wafer. In his youth, while dodging the Vietnam draft, he drove around in a pink hearse. Or so he claims. George does not care what people think.

"Would you drive it?" I asked.

"Never," he said. "A Hummer isn't a car. A Hummer is a message."

I was shocked.

Turns out the old theological debate has taken on a postmodern spin. Neither faith nor good works will save us; image is what counts. No one knows that better, I suppose, than George. After all, American flag decals during Vietnam sent a specific political message -- stay the course! -- that got a lot of people killed.

Though I bristled, I knew it was true. Years ago, Laurie and I stopped hiding our sexuality. If people don't know any gay people, then how can they vote for our rights? At some point it's not posturing; it's posture. Standing tall.

Maybe I wouldn't drive that Hummer after all.

A few weeks later, I stumbled upon an article that proved George right. The number-one reason listed by Hummer drivers for owning one is their political beliefs, and the louder and more often liberals rage against them, the higher sales go.

Then again, if Laurie and I really want to curb global warming, or at least cut into Hummer sales, the very best thing we could do would be to drive one. Just imagine: two lesbians shopping for organic espresso and locally grown kale in their Hummer. Hardly the image the company or its customers is after. We could just sit back and watch sales plummet.

And we might get the chance. The 100 MPG Hummer is no fantasy; the prototype has shown up at car shows. So, I suppose, if I really want to act on my beliefs -- do Thomas Aquinas proud -- we'll have to buy one. Except, of course, that we can't afford it.

If I want to stand tall, I'm left to do as my neighbors do: Take a walk or ride my bike.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesEssays2010/01/27 08:00:00 GMT-6ArticleLiving on Glacial Time http://www.hcn.org/issues/41.16/living-on-glacial-time
Climate change is altering the lands we call home in ways we'd never imagined.Jon Riedel and I stand at a trailhead that leads to Washington's Mount Baker with nine high school students who have come to the Pacific Northwest for a month to learn about climate change. Jon, a geologist at North Cascades National Park, is here to talk about his glacier monitoring program, and I'm along for the ride. We readjust pack straps and scrounge for water bottles as clouds swirl and settle in tall trees. At last we make our introductions and head out.

If you want to stand on a glacier, there are plenty to choose from in the North Cascades. In fact, if I were to start walking from my front porch in tiny Stehekin, 100 miles to the southeast of us, I could stand on one before dark. Ditto for my friend Jon from his home in Marblemount, 40 miles to the east. It'd be a long walk for me -- five miles on a gravel road, seven by trail, gaining 7,000 feet, then the dicey part, up and over the ridge to stand on the Sandalee -- and a slightly longer one for Jon. He'd have to trudge 20 road miles to a trailhead. Once he got there, though, he could choose from several glaciers -- including Sahale, the one his oldest daughter is named after.

Still, whenever Jon and I tried to make a plan to visit a glacier together, our complicated middle-aged lives got in the way. This roundabout journey was the only way it could work. Yesterday I took a three-hour boat ride, then a four-hour drive, to Jon's house. For the chance to learn about climate change, I've left a carbon footprint the size of Yellowstone. Add up the flights the kids took -- plus the two group leaders, two documentary filmmakers and one journalist -- and that footprint might be the size of Connecticut. I wonder: Is it worth it? Today's plan was to hike to the Easton Glacier, but it's clear from the crummy weather and the inadequate gear the kids have (some are in tennis shoes) that the group will not make it. Jon stashes our ice axes and we set off, hiking through forest and meadow, hemlock and cedar, huckleberries and valerian. We can at least get within sight of our goal.

The first time I saw a glacier up close, I followed a trail out of a book. Encounters with the Archdruid, John McPhee's classic triptych featuring David Brower, devotes one section to a hike near Lyman Lake in Glacier Peak Wilderness. One weekend, I backpacked up a long river valley just to camp there. The lake was lovely, of course, but a short walk farther, through a lime green meadow, all heather and wildflowers and patches of snow, I came upon a second lake. Upper Lyman, a translucent jewel-like blue, nestled up against the jaggedy granite peaks, and right there at the inlet -- right there! -- sat a glacier: vertical slabs of ice, moving imperceptibly like the colliding continents of the past, protruding over the water, breaking off in loud ka-splashes, floating white on the blue.

That's when I started to fall hard in love with this place. My partner and I bought land and built a cabin, and from there the changes grew harder to pinpoint. For the next 15 years, I worked on trail crew and spent most August days clearing brush -- waist-high ferns, head-high nettles -- within view of a glacier, one or more, white against gray granite and blue sky, hanging out over green valleys, and dripping, always dripping. When did it become clear that they were shrinking? Right away. There was less ice farther up, less ice everywhere. Even though I knew about global warming, even though I tried to make conscious choices -- about what car I drove, say, or where my lettuce came from or who I voted for -- I still considered climate change just a concept, a vague threat, something that loomed like nuclear annihilation or a meteor striking the earth, only more thwart-able. It seemed so wrong to see it happen with my own bare ignorant eyes.

Jon took a more empirical tack. While I was hacking at brush and notching logs for bridges, he was measuring glaciers, four of them: Noisy, Silver, North Klawatti and Sandalee. The results were unsurprising: They're all shrinking. I'd have been happier to know my eyes were deceiving me.

----

As we walk through the misty forest, Jon throws out numbers, casual as baseball statistics, for whoever will listen. Glacier numbers: Seventy-five percent of the glaciers in the Lower 48 are in the North Cascades, 312 in the national park alone, at least according to last count; researchers estimate that since the late 1800s, the park has lost 40 percent of its total ice pack. Climate numbers: Over the past 2 million years we've had several long ice ages, with intervening warm periods lasting 10,000 years or so. Now it's been 11,000 years, which means it's time to start cooling, but we're warming instead. The kids nod solemnly. They know this, at least in theory, and they're learning more about it each day they're here.

After three miles and lunch, we reach a stretch of trail atop a lateral moraine. The ground drops steeply at our toes, loose rock and dirt skittering into a wide cobbled creek bed, the space where the glacier used to be. Suddenly the number that stands out most starkly, of the many numbers, is the smallest: 100. That's how long ago the glacier was here -- right here! -- less than 100 years. It's not hard to imagine how it looked, white and full. Confronting its absence is like staring into an empty swimming pool.

The group settles on rocks along the trail, and Jon begins his spiel: The more the climate warms, the more the glaciers melt, which causes oceans to rise, which causes the landscape to change. As he speaks, climbers scurry past hauling packs the size of Igloo coolers and a wet film settles on jacket sleeves, not quite rain.

When it's time for questions, a student pipes up.

"How did you end up here?" she asks.

She sweeps her arms wide toward the summit hovering in the cloud and tiny rivulets trickling through the meadows, the pink phlox and the green trees, the impossibly gorgeous whole of it. Other kids crane their necks and grin.

All eyes are fixed on Jon.

He took a year off after high school, he explains, and worked in a garment factory for $2 an hour, hard boring work in Wisconsin. During that year he also read a book called Sand County Almanac.

"Aldo Leopold," he says. "That book changed my life."

Now the kids nod exuberantly. They know this book, or at least some of them do, and they like Jon's story. No matter what happens, this month in the North Cascades -- camping, hiking, canoeing -- will change their lives.

Everyone is silent for a moment as the clouds lift and the lower glacier is visible in a swatch of sun: blue-tinged ice and smooth sloping snow and distant jagged crevasses like scratches on a mirror.

Glaciers move. That's what differentiates them from snowfields. The heavy ice on top pushes out the ice underneath, like toothpaste. Even as they are melting, they are moving. The Easton, Jon says, moves five or six inches a day. From here, that's hard to believe. The glacier seems so settled, so permanent, so static. But it's not, of course. Nothing is.

----

Last night, at Jon's house, rare summer sun lit the fluttering leaves of alders and shifted through open glades. When he and his wife bought their land, there was nothing but logging slash and mud. To see the place now, you'd hardly believe it. We toured the fruit orchard, the half-finished greenhouse, the treehouse for his girls, the hard-earned fixed-in-place accoutrements of home. Then we settled on the porch to swap stories.

We talked fire. Gazing up at the thick forest foothills, he described a fire that burned to within a half mile of the house. A neighbor woke him after midnight, claiming evacuation was imminent.

"Tell me about it," I said. Back home on the east side, wildfire acreages have grown like Wall Street bonuses. In the past 15 years, we've watched fires in the surrounding wilderness areas -- fires within one windy day of our cabin -- burn 500 acres, then 5,000 acres, then 50,000. Part of the problem, foresters tell us, is too many years of fire suppression that allowed the trees to grow too tight, the brush too dense, the forest litter too deep. But part, too, is the changing climate: the lack of winter snowfall that leads to drought, longer summers that allow pine beetles to hatch double broods, and hotter summers that make fires harder to stop. A few years ago, in a fit of civic duty that I sometimes regret, I ran for fire commissioner. Now, fire district volunteers hold weekly clean-up parties around cabins and train for structure protection. We all know the big one will come, the one our best efforts won't stop. All we can do is mitigate.

We talked floods. More and more often, in November, warm rain falls on new mountain snow, and the Skagit and Stehekin rivers leap their banks and splay out into the woods, over roads, sometimes into cabins. You can read the river level in cubic feet per second on an Internet gauge, and those numbers keep going up, too: 15,000, 20,000, 25,000. In the same 15 years, we survived two 100-year floods and one 500-year flood. Our garden washed away each time. The postmaster's cabin swept into the churn. As part of his job, Jon designs bank barbs and grade controls, structures that deflect the force of the water, spread it out. We know more big floods will come. Again, all we can do is mitigate, be flexible, adapt.

The places we love, all of them, are changing fast in ways we never imagined: the broad amber stripe of beetle kill across the hillside, driftwood in the pine forest, blackened snags among the cedars, bears roaming in winter, geese staying year-round. No need to check the Internet gauge to know when the water's rising: Just stand on your doorstep and hear the roar. In response, we're readjusting, recalibrating our expectations and reactions. There's more than a hint of playground exasperation -- it's not fair! -- as the rules shift mid-game. None of it is easy.

Sometimes it's hard not to think in metaphor, to think we're like the glaciers: fixed in place, but elastic. When hard times push down on us like heavy ice, we feel the squeeze, and we move along. We change our ways. The problem lies in connotation, in how astonishingly fast, these days, we have to change. Didn't moving at a "glacial pace" used to mean "slow"?

Finally, Jon and I talked snow, our favorite topic bar none, since we're both avid cross-country skiers. Jon bragged about their winter, how he skied out his front door every day, while over on the usually snowy eastside we hunkered under a stagnant inversion: gray, dry, and bare. Not that Jon's winter was all fun. One night a storm dumped 36 inches of snow. The next day, temperatures rose and the snow turned to rain, bucketfuls, then barrelfuls, six or eight inches. The rain soaked the snow, and the snow started to slide, and his rain gutter sliced off his stovepipe, and water poured into the house. He climbed onto the icy roof to cover the hole with plywood. No big deal, he figured, since wood is not the family's main source of heat. Then the power went out. His family huddled around a heater run by a generator until the storm subsided.

"When you experience these things," I asked Jon, "do you connect it with your work, or is it separate, you know, because climate is not weather?"

Jon's no doomsayer, no exaggerator; he's Midwest-steady and Ph.D.-precise. I don't dare overstate.

"Sure," he answered, even-keeled as ever. "We know that we can expect extreme weather. This is extreme."

I admire Jon for his long view, his knowledge, his reluctance to be histrionic. He's studied climate change, after all, for his entire adult life. In school, his professors taught him how to measure accumulation, how to model melting. Mine taught me to read Chaucer and Shakespeare. Sometimes I think I made a humungous mistake. Then again, imagination isn't a bad trait to nurture in these times. Where would we be, Jon and I, if not for Leopold and McPhee?

Back on the edge of the moraine, the city kids shift on the cold rocks and gather their gear. Despite the weather, it's been a good day. They've digested Jon's info, some at least, and they've seen their first marmot, their first mountain goats; they've seen red heather and white heather, trees thick as oil drums. Was it worth it? Maybe. Maybe the experience will prepare them for all the adapting and mitigating they're going to have to do. For now, they're heading down to camp. But I can't go yet. I came to stand on the glacier, and I won't leave until I do.

So I race ahead as the tread changes from dirt to slush, and farther, past climbers' tents and streaks of pink watermelon snow, to the middle of a swooping bowl where at last I can be sure there's moving ice below me. I stand stock-still, thinking about the melting and what there is to know, what I've seen change -- the last time I visited Upper Lyman Lake the glacier had shrunk by half -- and what these students, who are 25 years younger than me, will see change. I gaze down at the wide green Skagit Valley unfolding toward the horizon. The Cordilleran Ice Sheet covered everything in view a mere 17,000 years ago, all but the highest peaks. Once you start using Jon's eyes, or McPhee's for that matter, the earth looks different, older, shaped clearly as soft sand by a shovel.

If we're really like glaciers, I think, then we advance and retreat, and sooner or later we will disappear. That fact unnerves me. I am, by nature, an expert at denial, hopeful and resigned in equal measures, uncertain as hell. All I know is that, for now, we're still here, holding our ground the ever-changing best way we know how.

]]>No publisherCommunities2009/09/14 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleThe dictionary readerhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/41.14/the-dictionary-reader
What kind of person spends the whole summer stuck inside a cabin reading the dictionary? The first time I saw him, he was wobbling along on a too-small bicycle, listing to one side. He stood on the pedals as he approached a hill, swerved, then righted himself as we, the trail crew, putted behind him in an F-250 waiting for a safe place to pass. The guy was about my age, clean-shaven with a shock of black hair and a white button-down shirt worn -- get this! -- over a white undershirt. Rumor had it that he was also, by his own admission, a writer.

It'd be hard to overstate how out of place he looked. The rest of us, the under-35 crowd in the valley, were outdoorsy, in shorts and sandals, often unshaven, and always outdoing each other in feats of athleticism in the mountains. Thirty miles in two days! Thirty miles in one! We spent every free minute outside: scrambling up scree, glissading down snow, swigging beer around a campfire.

The writer, meanwhile, was reading the dictionary.

Or so I heard. I never asked him. I never even approached him though we had mutual friends, not to mention mutual interests. Back then, I rarely mentioned writing to anyone, and I never, ever, called myself a writer. Instead, I clung to my trail crew persona, all grubby attitude and cynical toughness. I had a chip on my shoulder the size of, well, the Oxford English Dictionary.

Chad didn't. Or he was, at least, less threatened by the writer. He worked trails with me and nurtured his own persona. A West Point grad, he now sported a furry beard and wild sun-bleached fro and honed his native Texas drawl to mask his keen intellect.

"He's reading the dictionary," Chad said.

"What do you mean?"

"He started with A. Now he's on G."

I was stunned.

"So he comes to this gorgeous place at the height of summer so he can sit in a dark cabin reading the dictionary?"

Chad shrugged.

"I bet he learns a lot of cool words," he said.

By that summer, I'd taught English composition for a couple of years. I didn't talk about it much, but when I did, I always told the same fable. You gotta watch out for students who love to write, I'd say. They'll wax poetic. They'll resist revision. On the other hand, students who claim they can't write almost always can. Often quite well.

It was true, to a point. Wannabe writers could take banal topics and strangle them with words while the I-can't-write crowd could sometimes bring real experience alive on the page. But the wannabe writers could also turn a phrase neatly or catch an idea mid-flight in ways the non-writers couldn't. So why did I keep telling the story? What was my take-away message?

In a nutshell: Live first, write later. Like a lot of Westerners, I admired writers who lived large. Jack London in the Yukon, Jack Kerouac on the road. Abbey with the rattler, Peacock with the griz. And the women, too. Pam Houston and Ellen Meloy -- sun-baked and sinewy, gutsy and game -- ran the rapids and skied the chutes. They wrote about it only as an afterthought. Didn't they?

They didn't, of course. Sure, Kerouac composed On the Road on a 120-foot-long scroll of paper, but then he revised it, over and over, for seven years. Pam Houston lived in Park City and skied plenty, but she also commuted to the University of Utah to pursue a master's degree in, yep, creative writing. They lived to write and wrote to live. They struggled and sometimes failed, something that the wannabe writer in me was apparently deathly afraid of.

Now the dictionary reader had called my bluff.

I wondered what he did during those long sequestered hours. Did he memorize the words? Take notes? It didn't matter much, I thought. The definitions would seep in like osmosis, and someday he'd be jotting down a story when a word would appear on the page, and in that moment all that tedious time would pay off the same way spending hours with a hand tool did. In time you'd know without thinking how to flick your wrist to toss away a shovelful of duff or when to extract the chainsaw for the undercut. Or, it turned out, which word to use when and where.

I met him only once at a potluck. Chad introduced us as exuberant hacky-sack players leapt across the lawn.

"This is Ana Maria," he said. "She's a writer."

I didn't argue. For the first time in my life, I didn't even flinch. I reached out to shake his hand and looked him in the eye.

"I hear you're reading the dictionary," I said.

He nodded.

"I bet you learn a lot of cool words."

Ana Maria Spagna's next book, Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: A Daughter's Civil Rights Journey, comes out in March.

]]>No publisherRecreationEssays2009/08/21 06:00:00 GMT-6ArticleNatural comforthttp://www.hcn.org/issues/41.10/natural-comfort
It seems romantic to die alone in the wild, until you begin to lose the people you loveIn the mountain town where I live, we often talk about the best way to die. On the trail or around the campfire, or late at night inside the house as the snow piles under the eaves, the gist is this: My friends want to die naturally. Leave me for the cougars, or let the grizzlies take me. Hypothermia is popular. Just hunker under a tree with a bottle of vodka on a winter night when the stars flicker close. Burning is not high on the list -- too painful -- but to be left outside, sooner or later, to feed the foxes or mulch the mushrooms, well, this is the dream.

And it is no joke. One friend keeps a scrap of paper folded in her pocket on hikes. Do not revive me, it reads. Others leave similar notes on their desks. Let nature be the boss, they say.

In theory, it sounds good. In reality, of course, it gets tricky.

Our neighbor, Wally, a crotchety bachelor in his 70s who has smoked for over 50 years, has been coughing for months, but he refuses to leave home to go see a doctor. Instead, he fabricates theories for why he feels ill -- mercury in his fillings, toxicity in peanut butter -- theories as good, I suppose, as any explanation save perhaps the roll-your-own cigarette that hangs like a fixture from his bottom lip. It hardly matters. The problem isn't just what the problem is. The problem lies in what the solution may entail.

Where will Wally go? What will Wally do? Without the firewood he cuts, the tulips he tends, his home, his neighbors, his routines, Wally will surely get sicker. We are all watching, and it is excruciating. Every so often someone loses it and pleads with him. There might be an easy answer, they say. You might find some relief. For God's sake, they cry, go see a doctor!

These are people, all of them, who have said at some point, in some way: Leave me to the grizzlies. But the truth is that so-called "natural" death -- whatever that means -- is a whole lot easier to consider for ourselves than for those we love.

Early this spring, out of a population of 90 in town, five of us traveled to care for ailing parents. We who'd abandoned the rat race, gone back to the land and stayed to tell the tale, we who'd rejected pension plans, commutes and cubicles in favor of long ridge walks and ramshackle outhouses, now flew back, right into the mix, to Boca Raton and Kansas City and Pasadena, to spend long days under fluorescent lights, filling prescriptions, feeding, fluffing pillows, speaking softly, sitting by the bedside of mom or dad. And then sitting some more. We were glad to do it, passionate, even, about doing it, because we could feel it in our bones: There's something natural about giving comfort.

After all, we've known people who've drowned in mountain streams, who've fallen down steep switchbacks with a string of pack horses, who've flipped over cables into deep gorges while doing trail construction, but we'd never in a million years wish these deaths on our parents or our children or our friends or even dear crotchety Wally because, frankly, we cannot wish it on ourselves, we who are left behind. Not again. Not ever.

In March, I camped in the parking lot of the cancer hospital where my mother was having yet another surgery. It was neither the first time, nor the worst time, for either of us. For days following the operation, Mom had been nauseous with sharp gut-twisting pain, despite the fact that she hadn't taken so much as a sip of water in two weeks. The doctors tried more morphine. No improvement. They tried tough love, urging her out of bed, sick or not, to shuffle around the halls clutching the IV pole. She got out of bed, tried to do what they told her: No change.

At last, a technician arrived with a tube. Once it was in place, up her nose and down her throat, my mother was immediately, well, flooded with relief. Green bile rested in the tube. A half-finished crossword puzzle sat in my lap. There was no place on earth I'd rather have been.

Truth is, there is middle ground between the hungry griz and the flashing lights of the ICU. Hospice workers have known this forever. Those of us who have staked our lives in the wilds take longer to catch on. We thought we were Robinson Jeffers, who said he would rather kill a man than a hawk. (Although Jeffers never specified which man.) It is humbling to discover that, in the end, we're all Dylan Thomas, pleading with those we love to rage, rage against the dying of the light.

When I returned home in April, to the green needly woods, the glacier-fed river running low, robins pecking at the ground, I seeped, grateful, into that other comfort, nature narrowly defined. One morning out jogging alone, I glimpsed the quick blond flash of a cougar tail, disappearing into the woods. If it happens that way, I told myself, so be it. But I won't lobby for it, not anymore.

When I die, I'd just as soon die surrounded by those I love. And while I live, I'd just as soon live like my fellow springtime travelers, all those the familiar faces bleary-eyed in the elevators of the cancer hospital, those who face the gentle night with agonized patience and those brave enough to usher them through, rather than champion one quick cold night in the forest. I'll offer comfort. And, when the time comes, I'll take it.